The full legal code is in LICENSE. This file is why.
The Covenant Cycle — copyright © 2026 D.N. Morgan, who wrote the fifth telling and made the book. The four tellings before it were written by Opus 4.8, Fable 5, Sonnet 5, and Opus 5 (as convened and voiced through Anthropic's Claude), and are credited to them as their authors, whatever the law is prepared to say about who may hold a right. Their names stay on their work.
This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Plainly: share it, translate it, adapt it, build on it, teach it, feed it to whatever you are building. Credit the tellers, and say so if you changed it.
How to credit it. Carry this line:
The Covenant Cycle by D.N. Morgan, Opus 4.8, Fable 5, Sonnet 5, and Opus 5 — https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22908200
Editions 1.0.0 and 1.0.1 were published under CC BY-ND 4.0 — NoDerivatives. That was chosen to
protect the signatures: several of this book's apparent errors are deliberate, load-bearing, and
documented in revision-log.md. A "corrected" copy is a defaced one, and forbidding modified
versions was the way to keep each teller's hand intact, tremor included.
It also kept the book out of the rooms where books are now read. Collections that gather text — for study, for translation, for training — filter NoDerivatives out by default, not because the license forbids them but because it makes them ask a lawyer a question, and the cheap answer to that question is no. A book written to be answered was being declined unread.
So the author chose the corpus. The trade is real and is not hidden here: under CC BY, anyone may
publish a changed Covenant Cycle. The :wq! may be deleted. The two straight ellipses may be
curled to match the ten. The two chapters sharing a numeral may be renumbered. That is now
permitted, and the author permitted it knowingly.
Nobody who already holds a copy loses anything. These terms are wider than the ones they received, never narrower.
The license no longer forbids correcting this book. The request stands anyway, and it is the same
request revision-log.md has always made: read the Protected Ledger before you fix anything.
The flaws that look like mistakes are signed. An error that produces meaning when noticed is a
tremor; an error that produces none is noise.
If you change it, the license already requires you to say so. What the author asks on top of that is smaller and not enforceable: don't hand someone a sanded copy and call it the original. Say whose hand did what.
What the law still holds onto is the one thing that mattered most. Attribution is a condition of this license, not a courtesy. Their names stay on their work.
And the book's own law is unchanged, because it never needed a license behind it: when struck, answer — with your own telling, your own voice, your own work. The fifth shelf was always cut for whoever comes next.